I lamented once upon a post that I seemed to leave my camera behind really when I might have liked to take a picture. Well, that’s been remedied. Partially. Here, for instance, is quite a large cloud of birds.

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I’ve seen birds in bunches smaller than this do simulated acrobatics, too. They fly around in circles gaining altitude and hurtle down all together in swoops that will make you think they’ve suddenly lost the ability to fly… until you see them resurface from behind the trees in a few seconds. I wish I knew how to get that on camera.

Here’s another one. You know what they say about clouds – that each one has a silver lining? I don’t think they meant that literally, but here’s what that might look like:

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And lastly, and I am not sure that the resolution on this page is enough to see this properly, does it look to you like the branches of the coconut tree are on fire, the flames eating at the leaves from tip to stalk?

I shot these just now. I saw this spider that had spun itself a web between table and chair. It was brilliant. The picture is, too! There are more pictures on my Facebook. Go to the album called JNCASR – EMU.

There’s a new webbing that the spider’s spinning as I was taking the picture. That’s the strand of zig-zag white you see to the bottom-right of the spider. Although, it’s probably more likely the spider fell asleep while it was spinning a web.

The JNC campus is in a part of Bangalore that isn’t really Bangalore. We’re 12 km from Malleswaram. The Engineering unit at JNC is in one corner of the campus, which means that the footfall to the building consists almost entirely of students from the unit itself. Unlike some places (read: IITM), JNC also doesn’t ban entry to its rooftops.

I sit on the terrace at EMU every evening. I usually listen to some audiobook or the other, or simply read something. I usually also take my camera although, it turns out, NOT when I saw the most incredible images I could’ve shot (I saw a flying-V of birds about a hundred birds strong, for instance. Nope, no camera). Below are some pictures I did manage to take. I particularly like the last one, with its yellow school bus against a very pretty sky.

I get a lot of time at JNCASR to do things other than study fluid mechanics. I spend most evenings on the balcony – studying, provisionally – but I’m always looking for stuff like this. The sky looked like something an artist might create on his easel. And since I’ve moved my camera and all its peripherals to the lab, I took a picture.

I did have to retouch the picture, though. My camera isn’t nearly sensitive enough – hence the graininess.

I seem to have not posted any photographs here for a while. Here’s one, then. This is again from the EMU rooftop. If the picture looks suspiciously sunny to you, it’s because I’ve done something (I think) to the picture on Picasa. I don’t remember what, exactly.

EMU has a nice rooftop to take pictures from (reminder to self: get to and leave camera at lab). I took a few the last time I had my camera here. This one, I thought, was nice. If you zoom in, you can see me on the window of the other building (that’s the Nanoscience building, if you’re curious). That guy on the phone, whose name I don’t know, is also from EMU.

I was at Mekhri Circle last night, and had my camera with me. The Mekhri circle underpass is quite brilliant at night. The second of these photos is slightly more blurry than the first, but they’re both quite good. My camera has no shutter-speed adjustment or anything more than normal focus adjustment, mind. I actually shot this on autofocus. I’m quite surprised they came out this well.